Ward & Burke is a design-build-operate company established in 2001 and headquartered in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. With 1,000 employees across Ireland, the UK and North America, they provide a complete in-house solution spanning civil, process, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, control, automation, commissioning and operation of engineering construction projects. All staff are direct employees, from designers to fitters to on-site workers, including operating water and wastewater treatment facilities for years after handover.
The challenge
Ward & Burke's projects have long shelf lives. The water and wastewater treatment plants they build will be operational for 10 to 50 years. Logs of treatments, chemicals used and material specifications could become critical information long after construction ends.
Documents and drawings were always well managed. Email was the problem. A manual drag-and-drop process to SharePoint existed but adoption was inconsistent. When a historical email was needed, the process was cumbersome: identify who worked on the project, check if they were still with the company, dig through their archive, search through potentially years of mixed correspondence.
David Power, Head of IT, sums it up: "If it's difficult for people to file an email, they typically won't. It's a struggle."
The solution
Ward & Burke ran a six-week proof of concept starting in September 2020 with a deliberate mix of users: some who had been asking for a solution and some who were neutral. Three questions needed answering: would staff resist the filing prompts, did the AI suggestions actually work and were there technical issues that would create support burden.
The AI worked, correctly identifying projects when job names appeared in emails. The prompts were not a problem. Minor technical issues were resolved quickly with Ideagen's Mail Manager support team. Moving to full production simply meant increasing the license count and rolling out the software. The infrastructure was already in place.
Training was delivered in three bespoke sessions tailored to Ward & Burke's specific SharePoint setup and international time zones. The software deployed remotely via Microsoft Endpoint Manager. The IT team built a simple ongoing process: when a new job is created, they configure the corresponding Ideagen's Mail Manager location so staff can file from day one.
The results
Ward & Burke now has 200 users actively filing emails across the UK and Ireland, with over 52,000 emails captured and around 2,000 added every week.
The clearest sign of success is what David calls silence. The help desk receives very few tickets. Staff have absorbed the system into their daily workflow. As David puts it:
We're happy users, and I can't see that changing anytime soon.
Key outcomes
- 52,000+ emails filed and searchable, growing at ~2,000 per week
- Project email records accessible regardless of whether the original team is still with the company
- Search allows staff to quickly drill down to key emails even when large volumes have been filed
- Deployed remotely via Microsoft Endpoint Manager with no disruption to existing IT processes
- Bespoke training across three sessions tailored to SharePoint setup and international time zones
- Near-zero help desk tickets since full rollout
What this means for firms like yours
For construction firms managing infrastructure with multi-decade operational lifespans, the question is not whether historical email records will ever be needed. It is whether they will be findable when they are.
Ward & Burke's leadership had experienced the difficulty of clarifying what materials were used on projects from a decade earlier. That experience made the case for proper email management clear. The records are now there, project by project, ready for whenever they are needed.